Gunpei Yokoi
|birth_place=Kyoto, Japan |death_date= |death_place= Japan |death_cause= Struck by two cars while inspecting his car for damage after an accident |years active = 1970-1997 |alma mater = Doshisha University |occupation=Game designer |spouse=}} , sometimes spelled Gumpei Yokoi, was a Japanese video game designer. He was a long-time Nintendo employee, creator of the Game Boy and Game & Watch handheld systems, inventor of the modern day D-pad or 'cross' pad (a design that nearly all video game controllers use today), and producer of several long-running and critically acclaimed video game franchises. Early life Gunpei Yokoi was born in 1941 and grew up in Kyoto. He graduated from Doshisha University with a degree in electronics. He was first hired by Nintendo in 1965 to maintain the assembly-line machines used to manufacture its Hanafuda cards. Career .]] In 1966, Hiroshi Yamauchi, president of Nintendo at the time, came to a hanafuda factory Yokoi was working at and took notice of a toy, an extending arm, which Yokoi made for his own amusement during spare time as the company's janitor and machine maintenance man. Yamauchi ordered Yokoi to develop it as a proper product for the Christmas rush. The Ultra Hand was a huge success, and Yokoi was asked to work on other Nintendo toys including the Ten Billion Barrel puzzle, a miniature remote-controlled vacuum cleaner called the Chiritory, a baseball throwing machine called the Ultra Machine, and a "Love Tester". He worked on toys until the company decided to make video games in 1974, when he became one of its first game designers, only preceded by Genyo Takeda. While traveling on the Shinkansen, Yokoi saw a bored businessman playing with an LCD calculator by pressing the buttons. Yokoi then got the idea for a watch that doubled as a miniature game machine for killing time, and went on to create Game & Watch, a line of handheld electronic games. In , Yamauchi appointed Yokoi to supervise Donkey Kong, an arcade game created by Shigeru Miyamoto.Kent 158. Yokoi explained many of the intricacies of game design to Miyamoto at the beginning of his career, and the project only came to be approved after Yokoi brought Miyamoto's game ideas to the president's attention. After the worldwide success of Donkey Kong, Yokoi continued to work with Miyamoto on the next Mario game, Mario Bros. He proposed the multiplayer concept and convinced his co-worker to give Mario some superhuman abilities, such as the ability to jump from higher places unharmed. After Mario Bros., Yokoi produced several R&D1 games such as Kid Icarus and Metroid. He also designed ROB and the Game Boy, the latter of which became a worldwide success. Another of his creations, the Virtual Boy, was a big failure, but was not why he left Nintendo soon after. According to his colleague Yoshihiro Taki, "Yokoi had originally decided to retire at 50 to do as he pleased. His retirement had simply been a bit later than planned." According to David Sheff's book Game Over, Yokoi never actually intended for the console to be released in its present form. However, Nintendo pushed the Virtual Boy to market so that it could focus development resources on the Nintendo 64.Game Over: How Nintendo Zapped an American Industry, Captured Your Dollars, and Enslaved Your Children by David Sheff, 1993, Random House. Amid the failure of the Virtual Boy, Yokoi left Nintendo on August 15, 1996 after 31 years at the company. However, he did not leave before completing the more successful Game Boy Pocket as a going-away present in July of that year. Leaving with several of his subordinates to form a new company called Koto, Yokoi led the development of the Bandai WonderSwan handheld gaming machine.Geemu no Chichi, Yokoi Gunpei Den: Nintendo no DNA wo Souzou Shita Otoko by Takefumi Makino, 2010, Kadokawa Shoten. Death On October 4, 1997, while driving on the Hokuriku Expressway with his associate Etsuo Kiso, Yokoi rear-ended a truck driven by Takashi Okushima. After the two men had left the car to inspect the damage, Yokoi was hit and fatally injured by two passing cars. Contrary to urban legends of foul play, the driver of one of the passenger cars that hit Yokoi in the second accident was Gen Tsushima, a member of the tourism industry. Yokoi was pronounced dead two hours later. Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology Yokoi articulated his philosophy of (also translated as "Lateral Thinking with Seasoned Technology") in the book, , which consists of a collection of interviews. "Withered technology" in this context refers to a mature technology which is cheap and well understood. "Lateral thinking" refers to finding radical new ways of using such technology. Yokoi held that toys and games do not necessarily require cutting edge technology; novel and fun gameplay are more important. In the interview he suggested that expensive cutting edge technology can get in the way of developing a new product.Yokoi, Gunpei and Makino, Takefumi. . ASCII. May 1997. ISBN 978-4-89366-696-3 Game & Watch was developed based on this philosophy.Ryan, Jeff. Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America. Penguin. 2011. At the time of its development, Sharp and Casio were fiercely competing in the digital calculator market. For this reason, there was glut of liquid crystal displays and semiconductors. The "lateral thinking" was to find an original and fun use for this cheap and abundant technology. The Game Boy and NES were developed under a similar philosophy.Parish, Jeremy. The Troubled Past and Challenging Future of Nintendo 3DS: What the 3DS owes to Virtual Boy (and how it's different). 1up.com. 31 March 2011. However, this strategy has not always been successful. When video game consoles entered the 4th and 5th generation, Sony and later Microsoft adopted a strategy of embracing cutting edge technology and selling their console at a loss, which was compensated by the licensing fee from sales of games. Nintendo's failure to adopt compact disc technology instead of cartridges for the Nintendo 64 was cited as the main reason rival PlayStation gained the upper hand in the 5th generation console market.5 Biggest Game Console Battles | PCWorld On the other hand, in the handheld market, Yokoi's refusal to adopt a color display for the Game Boy in favor of long battery life is cited as the main reason it prevailed against Sega's Game Gear and the Atari Lynx. Satoru Iwata, the current CEO of Nintendo, claims that this philosophy is still part of Nintendo as it has been passed on to the disciples of Yokoi, such as Miyamoto, and it continues to show itself in Nintendo's current use of technology with the Nintendo DS handheld system and the home gaming console, the Wii.後藤弘茂のWeekly海外ニュース The Wii's internal technology is mostly the same as the previous game system, the GameCube, and is far behind the computational powers and multimedia versatility of other competing video game consoles in the seventh generation; still being the only one to focus primarily on motion-based controls. Nintendo's emphasis on peripherals for the Wii has also been pointed to as an example of Yokoi's "lateral thinking" at work.Jones, Steven E. and Thiruvathukal, George K. Codename Revolution: The Nintendo Wii Platform. MIT Press. 2012. The DS uses ARM processors at relatively low clock speeds and has far less computational power compared to Sony's competing PSP, yet has many features of modern technology built in (such as 802.11b, compatibility with Game Boy Advance games and touchscreen functionality). Impact In 2003, Yokoi posthumously received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Game Developers Association. GameTrailers placed him on their lists for the "Top Ten Game Creators". References External links *Gunpei Yokoi's Lifetime Achievement Award *N-Sider Profile: Gunpei Yokoi *N-Sider: History of R&D 1 *Gunpei Yokoi In Memoriam 1941 - 1997 *Searching for Gunpei Yokoi *Twenty Years of the Game Boy - Celebrating Gunpei Yokoi's Genius Category:1941 births Category:1997 deaths Category:People from Kyoto Category:Road accident deaths in Japan Category:Nintendo people Category:Metroid Category:Japanese video game designers Category:Video game development Category:Virtual reality pioneers